Grand Park is the most visited competitive youth sports complex in the United States, hosting more than 5.5 million individual visits each year. These visitors arrive, play and watch sports, and leave, contributing little to the life or economy of Westfield beyond perhaps the purchase of a meal from a chain restaurant by the highway. Recognizing this untapped potential, the City, working in concert with local developers, has decided to put a “there” there and give the sports complex an urban, walkable heart. Happily, the complex was developed as an amalgamation of sports fields around an empty center, an 140-acre donut-hole ready to receive a town.

Rather than just a new downtown surrounded by sport, the plan organizes a complete community around the life and business of recreation. New stadia, ice, and field house facilities supplement an existing 9-acre event center to the north—the location of the Indianapolis Colts Training Camp—punctuating a half-mile spine terminating on a new lake. These destinations are interspersed with housing, offices, shopping, dining—all the aspects of daily life. The spine itself, inspired by Speck Dempsey’s Monon Boulevard in nearby Carmel, unifies the community around a vast collection of sports-oriented amenities intended to help drive pedestrian traffic from end to end. A western “soccer-bound” and eastern “baseball-bound” canal complete the urban framework.